Cake bites: a messy solution to cleaning up.

During the Wilton decorating class I took, our instructor recommended that we save all of the extra pieces of cake from our projects (the leveled tops, crumbs, etc.) and freeze them for future use in cake pops.  I had never heard of such a thing, but a quick look around the blogging world revealed they were/are all the rage.  I'm not quite creative enough yet (and naturally, too impatient) to make "pops" which seem to require a lot of time letting things chill and set, so I took things in a different direction.

Basically, all you do is combine the cake pieces with some icing and shape them however it pleases you.  More specifically, I used chocolate cream cheese icing and blended my thawed red velvet cake tops into it.  Since I didn't want to make "pops", I made "bites".  I thought it would be as simple as pressing the icing-cake mixture into mini muffin tins, and with a little forethought I thought I saved myself a world of trouble.  I cut parchment paper strips and placed them in each muffin tin in hopes that they would allow me to easily remove the bites while retaining their shape.

There was really nothing "easy" about it in the end.  The icing-cake mixture had the consistency of play dough and didn't have much shape retention to speak of.  After several failed attempts to pull the bites out, I froze the whole pan and tried again with only a little more success.They ended up turning out just fine, however it was quite the struggle to pull them out without ruining them.

In the end, I did really like what came out of it.  The bites were smooth and creamy and just the right size both to decorate and eat.  I think I enjoyed the decorating portion most out of the whole process.  I have lots of photographic evidence:

By the way, I've decided that I really don't like the options available for editing this blog format.  I've tried changing the settings, but nothing seems to help.  I also cannot simply drag and drop pictures into position.  For instance, the smaller pictures at the bottom of this post are in nice little rows of three all the way down; unfortunately they don't keep that formatting after hitting "publish".  Oh well, more monkey work to do with it.

-Beth